Gender Studies Helping Girls and Boys, Book Argues

What began as a research movement aimed at improving educational
opportunities for girls has in recent years yielded techniques to help
both male and female students.

This evolution of understanding is at the heart of a new text on
gender issues and education released here last week by the National
Association of Independent Schools at the group's annual conference.
About 3,200 teachers, school heads, and other administrators attended
the group's four-day meeting.

In writing the book, Anne Chapman of Western Reserve Academy, a
grade 9-12 private school in Hudson, Ohio, compiled research from
hundreds of recent studies into 150 pages dealing with stereotypes,
pedagogy, and attitudes A Great Balancing Act: Equitable Education
for Boys and Girls that offers new educational practices based on
this research.

"It's keeping the things that work for boys and bringing in the
things that work well with girls," said Dory Adams of the
Washington-based NAIS.

Ms. Adams helps member schools with gender issues.

Ms. Chapman, now the academic dean at Western Reserve Academy, is a
former contributing editor to the journal Women's Studies
Quarterly. She began her schooling at a coed elementary program in
Hungary, then attended an all-girls school in England. Her first
teaching job was at an all-boys school, where she was the only female
instructor and was called "sir" by her students.

Her book goes beyond an examination of classroom practice and
encourages parents and school administrators, along with teachers, to
consider the effects of both what they do and what they don't do around
boys and girls.

"Education is a seamless web," she said. "What happens in one
subject's class affects what happens in another class, which affects
what happens at home."

Throughout all these environments, Ms. Chapman said, children's role
models must do a balancing act in recognizing the differences between
boys and girls, but also knowing when it's healthiest to address those
differences.

"My idea is you don't address this by suddenly treating both boys
and girls the same," Ms. Chapman said. "You do it by modifying your
actions to provide them more options."

Team Projects

Just as athletes benefit by training outside their own field of
competition, recent studies show that practices designed to help girls
learn are also effective for boys, Ms. Chapman said.

"The point is that educationally, what is disadvantageous for girls
is often also educationally disadvantageous to boys," she said.

Researchers have found that many girls, for example, are more likely
to assert themselves when working on team projects than when answering
questions individually in a lecture. While that conclusion has prompted
many teachers to use more cooperative learning techniques in their
programs, Ms. Chapman said that boys also increasingly need experience
learning through teamwork.

"The idea of educating girls in a separate way has never made much
sense," she said.

Because students often enter high school with many stereotypes
already ingrained in them, Ms. Chapman said it's important to reach
them as early as the preschool level. By playing more with building
toys, young girls may develop greater mechanical ability that later
translates into heightened confidence in studying math and science, she
said.

What's Left Out

In her book, Ms. Chapman also explains how teachers of very young
children should try reading fairy tales and then turning the stories
into parodies that focus on role-reversals for the male and female
characters. By hearing versions in which, for instance, the Sleeping
Beauty is about a man awakened by a heroic female, even young students
can begin to see how the stories they read contain different
stereotypes, she said.

"The idea of changing the outcomes and the outlines is to change the
mind-set of possibilities," she said.

Although Ms. Chapman stresses the importance of paying close
attention to what schools and parents include when they teach, she also
said adults should be aware of what they leave out.

"In history classes, the numbers of men killed in wars routinely are
mentioned, but the number of women who died in childbirth almost never
are," she said as an example. "It's better to be conscious of what
you're doing."

Ms. Adams of the NAIS said many teachers, parents, and school
officials aren't taking advantage of the latest research.

"What happens in the culture can have just as much impact as the
homework and formal classroom instruction," she said. "You wouldn't
have to look far to find classrooms that are ignoring all the research
that's been done."